An American kid hired as an assassin for a Mexican drug cartel sits in a safe house in Laredo and brags about his hits and the one he's planning next — only this time Texas police are watching.

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Three screens. The first shows the house's driveway and the street just in front of it. The camera shooting this footage is installed above the garage and is pointed outward. The second screen shows the kitchen, with a waist-high counter island in the middle and a cheap folding table beyond it. The third screen shows the living room. It obviously hasn't been lived in. There's no furniture, just wall-to-wall carpeting and a door that leads out to the kitchen. A man in a striped shirt and long, baggy shorts is pacing back and forth in the living room. He's holding a cell phone, speaking in Spanish. The microphones in the room are very good, and everything the man says comes through distinctly. The microphones are so good, in fact, that they pick up what is being said on the other end of the line, too. That's not necessary, though, because the transmissions to and from the phone are also being monitored. The house, a pretty little white-brick three-bedroom in one of Laredo's better neighborhoods, was "activated" this afternoon, April 8, 2006, meaning that the cameras and microphones in and outside it began transmitting live wire feeds to a windowless room at the DEA regional office a few miles away. The man in the baggy shorts, Juan Valdez, does not live here, at this house, but he works for the men who do. They are professional hitmen, sicarios, employed by the Zetas, the enforcement wing of one of Mexico's largest drug cartels. Valdez works as a sort of gofer, bringing groceries or whatever else the sicarios might need. That's why he's here now: He came to check in on them. When he saw they weren't here, he phoned the group's leader.

"Nothing," says the man on the other end of the line. "What's up with you?"

"Nothing. You haven't told me to do anything."

"Well, we're gonna do a job, guey. But we already have the group ready. We have everything ready."

"What's going on? What do I do?"

"Well, nothing. We already have everything. Everything's very well organized."

"All right, I'll be here at the house," says Valdez. He hangs up.

Forty-five seconds later his phone rings.

"Listen, guey. Yes, there is a mission for you. The job we're on is like this: There's a blue Hummer parked outside of Cosmos. A blue Hummer. Outside Cosmos. We need someone watching for the vato who's gonna be walking toward the Hummer. You watch for him."

The man on the other end of the line tells Valdez that as soon as he spots the dude approaching the blue Hummer, he's to call another member of the crew, a guy named J. P.

"I'll give you his number. You call and you say, 'Hey! The vato's getting into his truck! The vato's getting into his truck!' "

A literal translation of the question Valdez posed would be "Does he have a toy with him?" For anyone versed in the local slang, though, its real meaning is clear. Which is why Detective Robert Garcia, as soon as he hears Valdez say what he says, makes a quick announcement to the other people in the wire room. "Gun," he says. "Toy means 'gun.' "

The man on the other end of the line responds to Valdez's question.

"He already has a toy. He already has a toy."

Garcia takes his headphones off, grabs his gun, and heads down to his truck.

The center console of Garcia's Jeep Cherokee is a jumble of radios, one each from the FBI, the DEA, and the Laredo Police Department, three of the nine agencies involved in Operation Prophecy. He uses the radios to order ten unmarked units stationed near the safe house to head toward Cosmos Bar & Grill. There are two driveways in and out of the lot, and soon a unit is parked near each. Another unit locates the blue Hummer, parks nearby. A six-man SWAT team stations itself in an armored vehicle a quarter mile away, behind some water tanks.

Garcia parks in a lot across the street from Cosmos Bar & Grill. Garcia's view of both Cosmos and the blue Hummer is obstructed by a stand-alone Sprint store that sits near the entrance to the Cosmos lot. He parks like this on purpose. Garcia knows the sicarios, and they know him. They would recognize his car if they saw it.

He sits back, headlights off and AC on, and listens to his radios. Within a minute or two, one of the unmarked units reports that it's spotted men who fit the descriptions of two of the sicarios from the safe house, including J. P., the triggerman. But nobody has spotted Gabriel Cardona. He's the one directing this hit. He's the guy who's been talking to Valdez.

Garcia listens to the radio chatter and looks out the windshield of his truck. Traffic cruising by. Lots of SUVs, lots of pickup trucks. Now another pickup. Moving slower than the ones ahead of it. Holding up traffic behind it a bit. Four doors. Blue Ram. The driver is looking toward Cosmos, but he doesn't pull into the entrance. He pulls into another lot, catty-corner to the lot Garcia is in, parks in front of a bank, nose toward the Cosmos lot. The driver is young, looks twenty or so, wearing a polo shirt and khakis. He keeps his black hair very short on the sides, a little longer on top.

"I got him," Garcia says into his radio. "I got him."

Cardona is on his Nextel now, using the cell phone's push-button walkie-talkie function. The wire room relays the conversation to Garcia.

"Mackey is the one we're going to kill," Cardona tells Valdez. "Before Mackey gets into his truck, you call J. P. and you tell him, 'There goes Mackey, there goes Mackey! He's the one wearing such and such!' And that's it."

"J. P., is he the only one I'm supposed to call? Just him?" Valdez asks.

"Yes, just him. Just him. He'll do the job and then another guy will be waiting around the corner for the getaway."

With the evidence Garcia already has, he could probably put Cardona away for twenty years. But he wants more: more years for Cardona and his crew, more information about how they operate, more links to other cells in Laredo, more evidence tying them to their bosses across the river. He needs more time on the wire. But he can't just watch while Cardona and his crew take out the owner of the blue Hummer.

Garcia issues an order to two marked cop cars nearby: Pull into the Cosmos lot, flash your lights, then just sit there.

Cardona doesn't move. Garcia had hoped the cop cars would spook him, make him cancel the hit. But he isn't moving. Garcia watches Cardona, watches him watch the cop cars, wonders what he's thinking. And then he watches him get back on his Nextel.

A few minutes later, someone in the wire room relays Cardona's transmissions back to Garcia.

Cardona has decided that now that cops are here, J. P. shouldn't kill Mackey after all. Instead, Cardona wants the crew to just stay in place till Mackey leaves Cosmos. They will let him get into his blue Hummer. They will let him drive away. And then they will follow him. They will each take turns tailing him for a little while, then dropping back and letting the other take the lead, like riders in a peloton. They will do this until Mackey gets somewhere isolated, alone.

At 2:10 A.M., the owner of the blue Hummer pushes through the heavy doors of Cosmos. His eyes take a moment to adjust to the new lights, brighter than the ones inside. Then he starts walking toward his vehicle. He climbs into the Hummer, turns the key in the ignition.

Garcia issues another order.

At 2:12 A.M., the wire room intercepts the following conversation between Gabriel Cardona and Juan Valdez.

Juan Valdez: He's coming out through the north side. The north side. He's leaving the lot. But, um, there are two cop cars behind him.

Cardona: The north side? Like he's heading toward Del Mar? That way?

Valdez: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The north side. The north side. But be careful, man. The cop cars are right behind him.

Cardona: Okay, I'm headed over there.

Valdez: Okay. Okay. He's parked! The police pulled him over!

Cardona: Qué onda? Qué onda?!

Valdez: Pinche puto! This culero is very lucky.

Cardona: Let's wait and see if they let him leave.

Valdez: All right. I'm watching everything over here.

Cardona: What's up? What's going on?

Valdez: It looks like they're arresting the guy! It looks like they're handcuffing him, like they're gonna take the puto away. Do you think he was drunk, or what?

Cardona: What? What was that?

Valdez: Was he drunk, or what?

Cardona: He probably had a pistol on him, the pendejo.

The hitmen stay in place for another ten minutes. They wait to make sure that the owner of the blue Hummer won't be coming back. They wait until a tow truck comes and hauls the Hummer away. And then the hitmen leave.

They go back home.

Garcia pulls up behind a parked squad car. He gets out, peers into the back of the cruiser. The man inside is not Mackey. Instead he is a local dentist who looks a little like Mackey and owns a Hummer that looks just like Mackey's. Garcia tells him that some sicarios almost killed him that night. He tells him that the police arrested him to protect him.

Detective Roberto Garcia is forty-one years old, a little plump, wears glasses, has a mustache. His skin is dark brown, and though he's of Mexican descent, sometimes people mistake him for Indian. He has a tattoo just below the shoulder of his right arm. SOCRAN, it reads. He got it maybe ten years ago, back when he worked as a narcotics detective. A lot of his former colleagues got the same tattoo, and when they run into one another now, they throw the word around as a term of endearment, like other people might use the word buddy. "How you doing, socran?" they'll say, and give one another strong, back-clapping hugs.

Garcia thinks he might get another tattoo on his other arm one of these days, to memorialize the sort of detective he is today.

REDRUM, it will read.

Moving from narcotics to homicide in Laredo doesn't move you very far. You're dealing with different sorts of crimes, but these different crimes are often committed by the same people, and both stem from the same root problem: Cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamines are cheap in Mexico and expensive in the United States. The drug corridor between Nuevo Laredo and its sister city, Laredo, just across the Rio Grande, is among the world's most lucrative, and control of it has always been a source of lethal conflict between Mexico's drug traffickers. So it doesn't really matter if you're working homicide or narcotics at the Laredo Police Department. Either way, you've got plenty to keep you busy. Especially now, with the war between the Zetas and the Chapos.

A few years ago, a number of different drug-trafficking families operated out of Nuevo Laredo, with none dominant over the others. Then the Zetas muscled in and quickly decimated the higher ranks of all those families, absorbing many of their subordinates in the process. The Zetas are the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel, Mexico's second-largest drug-trafficking organization. They took their name from their founders, a group of rogue military officers who co-opted the radio code name Zeta, which means Z in Spanish. Now the Chapos are making their own play, trying to wrest control of the region from the Zetas. The Chapos, members of the rival Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico's largest, take their name from that cartel's current leader, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Nuevo Laredo and Laredo currently host numerous cells of sicarios, some made up of Zetas and some made up of Chapos. These cells operate on both sides of the river, drifting back and forth across it, moving from one safe house to another. Sometimes a sicario ends up crossing one frontier too many. For example, last year a former Nuevo Laredo police officer named Bruno Juarez started working as a Zeta sicario, then decided to hire on with the Chapos instead. It was a job change that proved unwise. The Zetas took him out last June.

The Bruno Juarez job, incidentally, was Gabriel Cardona's first professional hit. He'd started killing people a few years beforehand, but those were just amateur actions, thrill kills. Cardona is nineteen years old. He was born in San Antonio and moved down to Laredo when he was four. Like a lot of kids growing up here, his life straddled both sides of the border. He went to school in Laredo on weekdays, partied in Nuevo Laredo on weekends. He was steeped in both cultures, loved Tupac and reggaeton. When he was fourteen, outside a Nuevo Laredo nightclub, he shot a drunk guy in the face for no particular reason. He felt bad about it for a week or two afterward, but he didn't get caught. And the next time he killed, he didn't get caught, either. Eventually, the right or wrong person, depending on your perspective, noticed this precocious killer and decided his natural proclivities might be worth molding.

The Zetas have training camps just across the border where they teach the basics of murder for hire. How to shoot straight. How to cover your tracks. Even how best to exploit the lack of cooperation between Mexican and American law enforcement. Every time Cardona kills somebody in the United States, he knows to immediately cross the bridge into Mexico and lie low for a while. Likewise, every time he kills somebody in Mexico, he heads straight back into the United States.

By his own count, Cardona has murdered twenty to thirty people. All of his professional kills have been at the behest of a man named Miguel Treviño, a Mexican citizen who is number two in the overall Zeta hierarchy. Treviño currently has a list of about forty people in Laredo whom he wants dead. Cardona does not have access to the list. No single cell of sicarios has access to the entire list. Instead, contracts are doled out sparingly. Sometimes cell members track their targets down themselves. Sometimes they receive tips. There are women in Laredo who spend time in nightclubs and carry in their heads the faces of certain targets. When a face in a club matches a face in their head, they call a phone number. If their information proves accurate and leads to a successful hit, these women receive a small percentage of the hit's total payout.

A successful high-priority kill can earn you $50,000. One week ago that's what Gabriel Cardona received for collaborating on a mission between two different cells of sicarios. The climax of that operation came at a red light on the south side of Laredo, when Cardona and two other gunmen rose out of the bed of a pickup truck and fired dozens of rounds into another truck stopped at the light, killing a Chapo-allied drug trafficker named Chuy Resendez, as well as his fifteen-year-old nephew.

Cardona's stock has been on the rise among the Zeta leadership, and Cardona feels that he's reached a stage in his career where he can be less hands-on and can delegate responsibilities to others rather than always pulling the trigger himself. And he's begun recruiting and molding young talent himself, taking under his wing kids like J. P., who was going to be the triggerman for the Cosmos hit.

Of course, Garcia doesn't know all these things, all these details, yet. They're the sorts of details, the sorts of evidence, Operation Prophecy will help him accumulate.

Day two. Garcia didn't go home to his wife and kids last night. He didn't sleep. Instead, he spent much of the night monitoring the wire, as he is now.

Cardona is in one of the bedrooms of the safe house. None of the bedrooms have cameras in them, so Garcia can't see him. But he can picture him. He imagines him lying on the deluxe air mattress that two of Cardona's men purchased earlier this afternoon. Plainclothes officers followed them through the store, watching the hitmen shop. They bought four of these mattresses, along with some basic bedding and some eating utensils for the kitchen. A short while after the hitmen got back to the safe house, the men in the wire room heard a high-pitched whining noise through their headphones and wondered what it was. The noise was being generated offscreen, and for a moment Garcia imagined dreadful things happening, things involving chain saws and power drills and human flesh. And then he realized what the sound was: the electric pumps of the mattresses, sucking air. So although Garcia cannot see Cardona, he knows he's lying on his new, freshly inflated mattress. And he knows exactly what he's doing. He's talking on his newly wiretapped phone with Maria Lopez,* a girl he's been dating for more than a year now. Their relationship is stormy, and she's apparently decided to call it off.

"I never thought I would do it, and that's why I did it," she says. "I was tired. You promised and you promised and you just kept taking advantage of me."

Lopez's voice bears the husky imprint of recent tears, and she's sniffling a bit. She's speaking English now, but their conversation, like most conversations in Laredo, bleeds back and forth between English and Spanish.

"Yeah, I know, and I'm sorry," Cardona says. His English is fluent, though occasionally clumsy, as it is now, as he tries to tell Lopez that the breakup is his fault. "I'm deserving… I'm deserving what I'm needing to deserve."

"I don't have anyone else," Lopez says, the sniffles tipping back to sobs. "You don't understand how I feel when you don't call me. It just feels so terrible."

"You know sometimes I can't call, Maria. I have to do what I have to do."

Cardona pauses for a moment. He's torn, turning the words around in his head. Maria knows what he does, but she doesn't know the details, and she probably shouldn't.

"I've been busy," he says. "And if you don't believe me, just look at Chuy Resendez."

There's a whiteboard hanging on a wall in the wire room, and Detective Garcia has taped a few photos to it. Miguel Treviño is there. Below are pictures of some of the people involved in leasing the safe house, and below those, in the middle of the whiteboard, is a picture of Gabriel Cardona, flanked by the members of his crew. Garcia has drawn lines among the various pictures, indicating presumed connections, hierarchies, networks. One of the goals of Operation Prophecy is to make all these lines solid, to bolster them with evidence gathered through surveillance.

For years now, virtually every homicide in Laredo related to the Zetas or the Chapos has wound up on Garcia's cluttered desk. He's developed a reputation as an expert on the cartels. So when agents at the DEA received intelligence a few months ago indicating that the Zetas were planning to establish a new safe house in Laredo, they phoned Garcia directly. The highly unusual idea to pool the resources of nine different agencies and prewire the Zeta safe house for sound and video sprouted from that phone call. And though all those other agencies have pitched in by providing technology or manpower or both, investigating and preventing murders in Laredo is still jurisdictionally a matter for the Laredo Police Department. That's why Garcia is the man in charge of this thing, making the major decisions. Eventually, he knows, he'll have to decide when the risks of letting Cardona and his sicarios remain free outweigh the benefits of keeping the wire alive. When that happens, he'll stop the operation and send in the SWAT team.

By then he hopes the wire will have produced enough evidence to put Gabriel Cardona away and keep him there. In the past year, Cardona has already been arrested and charged with murder twice, and both times deep-pocketed associates have managed to bail him out. He's out on bail now, awaiting trial. After Cardona's previous arrests, Garcia spent hours in interrogation rooms with him, trying to get him to confess. Cardona is smart enough to be careful when talking about what he's done in the States. But — and this is what really gets Garcia — he freely admits to murdering people in Mexico. Cardona knows there's nothing much Garcia can do with this information. And he also knows how much that gets under Garcia's skin.

Garcia hasn't been to Mexico in years. He was born there, in Piedras Negras, about a hundred miles northwest of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. When he was in fourth grade, his parents came across the river, and he came with them. They came for money and lived in a place called Eagle Pass. They worked as migrants, traveling the country, picking sugar beets and cucumbers and onions. They all had green cards. Garcia didn't become an American citizen until he learned that he had to become an American citizen to be a cop. And now he lives here in Laredo, with his wife and their two children, just across the river from his homeland, which he never goes to anymore. It's just too dangerous these days. There's no chief of police in Nuevo Laredo. The past three have quit or been murdered. The second of those three chiefs had been in his position for less than a day. And the guy who ordered the murder of that chief of police was likely Miguel Treviño, the same guy who ordered Gabriel Cardona to organize yesterday's attempted hit on Mackey.

Garcia is a somewhat ambivalent American citizen, considers himself as much Mexican as American. But he's a proud American cop. And he knows that a cop like him, who knows how to navigate the system, can tap into great resources, resources that Mexican cops simply don't have access to. It would be a shame to waste those resources.

So Garcia remains in the wire room, his eyes on the screens and his mind on the whiteboard, and waits to see what Cardona does next.

The hitmen are home. It's late afternoon. They're puttering around, settling in, getting their house in order. Cardona unpacks the new kitchen utensils, fills a drawer with them. Then he goes into the garage and comes out with his arms full of new towels, striped. He walks out of the frame of the camera's viewfinder, presumably to distribute these towels to the rest of his crew. At a little after 5:00 P.M. Cardona is back in the kitchen, along with everyone else. There's a Big Gulp cup full of soda on the kitchen island, and it's a sort of communal soda trough: They each periodically sip from it. At one point Cardona pulls up the back of his black polo shirt, shows off a new tattoo. It's a picture of Santa Muerte, a skeletal and quasi-religious apparition that has been adopted as the patron saint of cartel hitmen. Juan Adolfo Ramos, whom Cardona affectionately calls Juanillo, rubs a hand down the Santa Muerte tattoo, compliments Cardona. Raul Jasso, twenty-four, does, too. J. P., the would-be triggerman for last night's aborted hit, stands off to the side a bit, in the corner. He's from north Texas, and the guys are always giving him shit for his broken Spanish. J. P. didn't bring many clothes with him down to Laredo, and he's wearing a long black Scarface T-shirt that Cardona lent him. Tony Montana's sneering face covers most of his torso.

At about 5:30, someone else comes into the kitchen. Cardona hands him a plastic bag containing ten ounces of cocaine. Cardona wants the guy to take it from Laredo to Dallas on a bus. He knows of a buyer in Dallas who'll pay at least $5,000 for it, which is $3,000 more than Cardona paid. Cardona has decided to start reinvesting the profits from his hits like this, to make his money grow. They discuss ways to hide the cocaine during the eight-hour bus ride. Maybe stuff it down the front of your pants? Or push it down between the seat cushions? Cardona finally decides that the best strategy is to hide the coke in Coke. Meaning, you seal the cocaine up really tight, watertight, and then place it in a Big Gulp cup, just like the one on the kitchen island. Then if cops stop the bus to search it, as they often do along the Laredo — Dallas route, you just take the cup with you off the bus and keep on sipping.

The DEA agents are the ones scribbling furious notes now.

Conspiracy to traffic in narcotics.

More evidence. More years.

The hitmen go to sleep. Garcia does, too, dozing off in his chair for a while, but he doesn't leave the wire room. He's still there the next morning, day three, when Cardona makes his first call of the day.

"Qué onda?" says the guy on the other end of the line. Already the voice sounds familiar. A few words more and Garcia knows exactly who it is.

The last time he heard this voice, it threatened to kill him. Garcia had at the time been investigating the murder of a man named Noe Flores. His investigation had led him toward a teenager from Laredo named Rosalio Reta, another Zeta sicario. Which was when he received a call on his cell phone from Reta informing him that if he didn't stop the investigation, he and his wife and two young sons would be murdered. That was almost three months ago. There's been a marked unit parked outside Garcia's home ever since, and he's taken to sleeping with a gun beside his bed. But he didn't stop the investigation. It led to a murder warrant on Reta, who fled across the border. Which is where he is now, talking on his cell phone with Gabriel Cardona.

Cardona is yawning as he explains why he hasn't sent Reta some money he promised him. He breaks down how he's plowed through most of the $50,000 he received for the hit on Chuy Resendez.

"It was fifty," he says. "I gave twenty to Richard, I had thirty left. I spent eight in the Mercedes. That's twenty-two. From those twenty-two, I gave a thousand to Chava and a thousand to my brother so they could buy clothes. So that's twenty. From those twenty, I bought two thousand dollars in clothes. That's eighteen. From those eighteen, I gave five hundred to Becky and five hundred to Chamula. There are seventeen left. From those seventeen, I spent three in the hotel I was renting, and I got fourteen left. Of those fourteen, I only have twelve with me. From those twelve, I gave ten to my mother, so I just have two thousand for me, man. I had four thousand, but I used two thousand to buy ten ounces."

Reta accepts the explanation, then tells Cardona how he went out on a hit in Nuevo Laredo the other day and managed to accidentally shoot a chunk out of his own leg with an armor-piercing bullet. Cardona laughs, starts telling Reta a story of his own, about two Chapo-allied American teenagers he helped kidnap from a Nuevo Laredo nightclub last week.

"They died on their own from the beating, guey. They just died. They just died and shit, guey. You should have been there. You would have seen Poncho, dude. He was crying like a faggot —

" 'No, man, I'm your friend.'

" 'What friend, you son of a bitch, shut your mouth!'

"And poom! I grabbed a fucking bottle and slash! I slit his whole fucking belly. And poom! he was bleeding. I grabbed a little cup and poom! the little cup poom! poom! I filled it with blood and poom! I dedicated it to the Santisima Muerte. And then I went to the other faggot and slash! I slit him and same thing."

Reta laughs. Then he tells Cardona that he's bored.

"I'm just sitting here playing Xbox 360 and smoking weed," Reta says. Then he tells Cardona that Cuarenta showed up at the safe house where he is staying and showed him some pictures of new men on his master hit list.

"Well, you should ask El Comandante if you can come back over here yet," says Cardona. "Tell him I've got the next target all lined up. If you want, you can come over and help."

There's a story Garcia likes to tell, about the only gunfight he's ever been in. He was responding to a call — shots fired — in a rough part of south Laredo, down near the river. He had a rookie with him. The two rolled up and this guy with a pistol took off, shooting back over his shoulder. Garcia shot back seven times, hit him once in the arm. The perp kept going. Jumped over a fence and disappeared. A few days later, Garcia got another call — the same guy had been spotted near the same place. This time, the chase took them right down to the riverbank. No gunplay this time. Instead, the guy just looked over his shoulder, saw Garcia coming, and jumped into the river. Garcia watched him wade across, couldn't do anything about it.

The river is a wall. All you can do is make a call and hope the Mexican cops on the other side will cooperate. Sometimes they'll help you out and sometimes they won't. Hell, it's sometimes hard enough just to get interagency cooperation in Laredo, let alone international cooperation. It's usually easier to just stick with your own kind.

By the time the salesmen show up at the safe house, on the third day of the operation, the wire room has accumulated the comfortingly familiar detritus of any stakeout, federal, state, or local: Whataburger wrappers and pizza boxes, soda cans and coffee cups, stubble and body odor.

The salesmen have been cruising the neighborhood in a red SUV, going from house to house, knocking on doors. A variety of unmarked units have noted and relayed their progress around the neighborhood, so the men in the wire room know they are on their way even before the camera above the garage shows them walking up the driveway.

The salesmen knock on the door. They wait. They knock again. They wait some more. They knock a third time. Then they walk away, down the block, to the next house over.

A minute later, Gabriel Cardona receives a call on his cell phone. He's been tailed all day, so the men in the wire room know that he is currently at Applebee's having lunch with Maria Lopez. The two are making up. The incoming call on Cardona's cell phone comes from the cell phone of Juan Adolfo Ramos, who's still back at the safe house.

"Two guys just came to the door!" Ramos says. "They just kept knocking! They knocked and they knocked and they knocked! I looked out the little hole and I could sort of see them. One tall and one short and heavy. The short one was dark-skinned, had glasses on. I think it might have been Robert!"

By Robert, of course, Ramos means Detective Robert Garcia, who is not in fact knocking on doors but is instead still here in the wire room, listening in.

"Don't worry," Cardona says. "It wasn't Robert. The cops have no idea where we are."

Garcia and the rest of the cops and special agents in the wire room are cracking up. Even now, Garcia knows he'll be retelling this sweet moment one day, just like he retells the story of the guy who jumped into the river, the one who got away. Only this new story, he's sure, is going to have a different ending.

Day four. April 11, 2006. 5:22 P.M. Gabriel Cardona sits in the kitchen of the safe house, miming holding a pistol, giving some last-minute advice. "You walk up to him and just poom!En la cabezota. But with both hands. In the crown, poom! You'll fuck him up. Otherwise… poom! poom! poom! poom! Four in the chest. And then en la cabezota, to make sure."

His men have been circulating in and out of the room. Two just finished wiping the cars in the garage clean of fingerprints, in case they have to abandon them. They use elaborate means to buy cars, send frontmen to pay dealers in cash, always paying a little extra so the dealer will drop off the vehicle, keys in the ignition, in the parking lot of a local mall, where somebody else can retrieve it. That way, the dealer never sees any of the sicarios in person. It makes the vehicles effectively disposable, hard to trace. It also helps if, after you kill somebody in one vehicle, you drive a little ways off and hop into another one that's waiting there, so by the time the witnesses at the scene of the hit give the cops a vehicle description, the description is already obsolete. And, of course, you always use fake tags, paper dealer plates filled out with random sequences of numbers and letters.

Garcia considers the situation. Considers his options. He has what he needs, he thinks. He has what he needs.

One of Cardona's pacing sicarios takes a breath so deep it's visible in the wire room, then starts pulling on a pair of black gloves.

Garcia gets on the radio, gives a final order. He rubs his eyes. He watches. He waits.

The screen whites out in the incandescent blaze of a flash bomb.

At first Cardona thinks they're gonna kill him. That's his first thought. He doesn't recognize the SWAT uniforms, doesn't realize they're law enforcement. All he sees is men with assault rifles and body armor, shouting, forcing him face-first to the floor. Facedown. Three months ago, he shot somebody who was lying facedown on the ground. Shot him three times in the back of the head. The bullets penetrated the skull, one of them even ricocheted off the inside of the skull, carved a second path through the dying man's brain. Cardona figures that the same might be about to happen to him.

Then he thinks they might let him go. As he's lying there, and they don't shoot him, and he realizes that they're cops, and he hears them searching the rest of the house, he starts thinking that maybe they're not going to arrest him, that they're looking for something or someone in particular. Maybe they won't arrest him. Maybe he'll get out of this.

He lies there, facedown, hands cuffed, for ten minutes.

Then he hears a familiar voice, and as soon as he does, he realizes that everything is not going to turn out all right.

"How you doing, Gaby?" Detective Garcia says. Gabriel Cardona looks up, shakes his head, and puts it slowly back down on the floor.

Three years later, while sorting through old files, trying to bring his workspace into some kind of order, Garcia finds some photographs he's never looked at before. They're of a red Volkswagen Jetta. Gabriel Cardona had abandoned the vehicle during one of his long-ago getaways, and a crime-scene photographer had snapped a bunch of pictures of the car from numerous angles. The photographer had also taken a detail shot, a close-up of the Jetta's license plate. On the upper right and lower right corners of the plate, there are spaces to fill in the names of the vehicle's buyer and the vehicle's seller. Typically, sicarios fill these names in as randomly as they fill in the tag numbers, and the name of the buyer on this plate does appear random. Garcia doesn't recognize it. He does, however, recognize the name of the imaginary seller, just as easily as he recognizes the cramped and effortful handwriting of Gabriel Cardona.

"Robert Garcia," the plate reads.

He smiles at the old, impudent joke, and muses for a moment about the strange bond of antipathy that developed between him and Cardona, a Mexican-American cop and an American-Mexican hitman. Then he files the photo away with all the rest.

The evidence generated by Operation Prophecy led to a forty-two-count federal indictment against fourteen people, including Gabriel Cardona. Many of the cases have already made their way through the system, and hundreds of years of prison terms have been doled out. Some sentences are still pending, and other cases have yet to be tried. Miguel Treviño's hasn't really begun, since he hasn't been caught.

Garcia's got new cases to worry about now, of course. New files to build. A double murder landed on his desk a few days ago, and he's gotta run out later tonight and grab a surveillance video from a local Tex-Mex joint where his prime suspect claims to have been dining at the time of the shooting. But overall, things are better now in Laredo than they were three years ago. The murder rate has dropped by 50 percent. Even so, sometimes Garcia feels like the pendulum has just swung away for a little while, that it's busy knocking people down in Juárez and Tijuana — twenty-four hundred bodies between them last year — but that soon it'll come crashing back his way. For instance, just last week, an old rival of Treviño's turned up dead in a Mexican prison. Garcia heard that the inmate had actually been abducted and carried away to a remote location, where he was tortured, his fingernails pulled off, before he was killed. Then his corpse was spirited back into the prison, where guards discovered it the next day.

Gabriel Cardona doesn't remember writing Robert Garcia's name on that old fake tag, before that old hit. From idea to execution, the scribble would have occupied only a few seconds, several years ago, and those seconds have slipped from his memory. But he's not surprised he did it. He doesn't deny it.

"I probably did it because of the coraje — the rage — I feel toward him. I don't like him at all. He plays wrong on you."

Cardona sits, fingers interlaced, at a battered table in the visiting room of the Telford state prison, east of Dallas, where he's serving eighty years for five murders. When he finishes his state sentence, if he's still alive, he will begin serving a life sentence for the murders of Poncho Aviles and Inez Villarreal, the Americans in Mexico he bragged to Rosalio Reta about beating and slashing to death.

While he was in jail awaiting trial, Cardona received two tattoos from another inmate. You can see these tattoos best when he closes his eyes and reveals blue-ink eyes staring at you from the surface of his eyelids. He regrets getting these tattoos now, since they usually just make it look like he's wearing eyeliner, a look that doesn't help him in prison. But the intended message of the tattoos is clear: He's always aware now, always wary, even when his eyes are closed. You can't watch him without him knowing it. Never again.

And Cardona has a message for Robert Garcia, too.

He wants Garcia to know that months before Operation Prophecy, months before Garcia scrutinized Cardona's life so minutely, Cardona had scrutinized Garcia's life. He used to spend days following Garcia around the city. Cardona would always drive different cars so Garcia wouldn't spot him. He would track him from place to place as Garcia cruised Laredo in his gold Jeep Cherokee. He offers up one recollection, from late 2005. It was right around Thanksgiving and he followed Garcia to a local Denny's and sat outside and watched him have lunch with another detective, Richard Ramirez.

"We could have gone right in and..." Cardona pauses, searching for the right words, " ...taken care of business."

That's what he wants Garcia to know. That Cardona was there that day, and many other days besides, and Garcia didn't even know it.

And, who knows, there could be somebody else watching him right now.

Somebody can always be watching you, and you'll never know until it's too late.